I’ve been on the road now for about 14 days teaching the Teel Tech Smart Phone course with Dr. Gary Kessler. His help, suggestions and mentoring have been invaluable.

We are currently teaching the course in Veenendaal NL at Data Expert to groups from the Dutch Police. During the four classes Gary and I have been co-teaching he has developed a Perl script to reverse engineer and study SQLite records.

In its current iteration the parser will accept any binary file and scan it assuming it contains sqlite records. This means you can carve out sections of unallocated space containing possible SQLite record fragments and reverse engineer the structure. This is helpful for decoding orphan records.

According to CNET’s by Don Reisinger in his online blog post on 6/6/11, Microsoft is suing companies in order to force them to pay royalties on alleged patent violations of Android. I have to say, though I’m not surprised by this tactic – Microsoft is stagnant – I find it highly irritating and disappointing.

All this patent suing is stifling innovation and ultimately harms the consumer. Do we really all want to have Windows mobiles? Don’t you want a choice? Don’t you want a healthy competitive market place where ideas flow and prices stay low? This is yet another instance of big companies gone wild, abusing the system and sticking their middle finger up at the rest of us as they grab more and more of the pie.

This is ugly poor form by Microsoft and other greedy selfish grabbing companies. Read more on Don’s article by clicking the link below

Stephen Shankland in his “Deep Tech” blog for CNET is reporting that Andy Rubin, the leader of Google’s Android Project has stated that Android is open source from a “software” perspective not a “community” perspective.

Shankland writes:

The reason for Google’s approach is so the company can control Android’s interfaces, the underlying features that Android apps use, Rubin told reporters at the Google I/O conference.
These application programming interfaces (APIs) are best developed in private and released only when Google deems them done, a process that ensures app compatibility, he said.
“Open source is different than a community-driven project,” Rubin said, in which a broad collection of people collectively determine the software’s future. “Android is light on the community-driven side and heavy on open source.”